the guards of the Natchez
wharf-boat with a touch as light as a human hand.

Down on the wharf-boat, in its double door, as beautiful in her fuller
years as in _Votaress_ days, and more radiant, stood Madame Hayle. A
man-servant at one elbow, a maid at the other, saw the group on the roof
fondly bidding for her smiles, but except one sent earlier to the two
Courteneys they were all for her husband and daughter, who, unseen from
above, awaited her half-way down the main forward stairs. When the maid,
however, leaned to her and spoke, her glance went aloft and her gestures
were a joy even to the strangers who crowded the boat's side. Now while
the stage was run out and her husband met her and gave her his arm, and
white-jackets seized her effects, the man-servant answered a question
softly called over to him by Ramsey, and the group overhead caught his
words:

"De twins couldn' come. No, miss, 'caze dey ain't in town. No, miss, dey
bofe went oveh to de Lou'siana place 'istiddy.... Yass, miss, on a bah
hunt in Bayou Crocodile swamp."

Mrs. Gilmore stole a glance at Hugh, but the only sign that he had heard
was a light nod to the mate below, and a like one up to Watson.

"Take in that stage," called the mate to his men. The engine bells
jingled, the _Enchantress_ backed a moment on one wheel, then went
forward on both, fluttered her skirts of leaping foam, made a wide,
upstream turn, headed down the river, and swept away for Natchez Island
just below and for New Orleans distant a full night's run. She had
hardly put the island on her larboard bow when merrily up and down the
cabin and out on the boiler deck and thence down the passenger guards
rang the supper bell.

"Bayou Crocodile," said a Carthaginian descending the wheel-house stair,
"that's where one of the sons-in-law has his plantation, isn't it?"

"On the Black River, yes," said he of Milliken's Bend.

"Near where it comes into Red River," added Vicksburg.

Once more Hugh and Ramsey sat alone side by side under a glorious night
sky, at that view-point so rarely chosen by others but so favored by
her--the front of the texas roof. Down forward at the captain's station
sat the two commodores and up in the pilot-house were the two pilots,
the Gilmores, "California," Madame Hayle, and they of Vicksburg and the
Bends.

In the moral atmosphere of this uppermost group there was a new and
happy clearness easily attributable to a single potent cause--Madame
Hayle.